Monte Vista Projects is proud to present Katie Herzog's exhibition Altered State Library. Herzog's first solo exhibition with Monte Vista Projects presents a series of site specific paintings depicting the interior of the public library branch closest to the gallery, each painted through the lens of a different psychedelic drug. The paintings symbolize the embodied subject in contemporary information theory, as information culture moves further into the digital realm and library buildings become defined by sensory perception. Inspiration for the show includes P. N. Witt’s infamous research on the effect of drugs on spiders in 1948, the chemical relationship between paint and madness, and the perceived identity crisis of the contemporary librarian. The materiality of text in the civic sphere is highlighted in Herzog’s Periodic Table of Elements, made of poured paint on a found drop cloth (used to paint her studio walls white), with lettering modeled after the City of Los Angeles beveled municipal font painted on the side of service trucks.

Katie Herzog lives and works in Los Angeles, where she serves as Director of the Molesworth Institute. Recent exhibitions include Transtextuality (Senate Bill 48) at Night Gallery, Object-Oriented Programming at the Palo Alto Research Center (Xerox PARC), and Pushing Paradigms in Painting at Rutgers University. Herzog received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2001 and a Master of Fine Arts from UC San Diego in 2005. She studied Library and Information Science at San Jose State University and has worked for a number of public and academic libraries ranging from a rural bookmobile in Monterey County to the Kappe Library at the Southern California Institute of Architecture in downtown Los Angeles.